Comparing The Disney Publicity output for “John Carter” vs “The Avengers”
Following is a side by side comparison of the publicity output for John Carter vs The Avengers on the theory that it would be revealing to see how these two films, both 250m “tentpoles” released by Disney within 8 weeks of each other, were publicized. Fortunately there is a tool for doing this — that being the IMDB Pro Movie Meter “data table view”. This data table view is different from the more standard “graphical view” which is what you get when you go to each movie’s page on IMDB Pro. Just for orientation, here is the standard “graphical view” for the MovieMeter function for a given film.
As you can see, there is an option for “Data Table” view — and that view looks like this:
In this view, what you get is a long spreadsheet with each week separated as you see above. For each week, there is the date (first column), the IMDB Moviemeter Rank for that week (second column), and then hyperlinks to all of the articles that appeared on the web about the movie during the week in question. The intention is to allow you to relate movement of the MovieMeter ranking (which tracks the number of clicks on the IMDB page for the movie) to the publicity that IMDB monitors.
So in the example above — the first week is January 23, 2011, when John Carter was ranked #2,462 and there were 7 articles monitored. In this week, it was essentially a replay of the same article about Disney moving the John Carter release date from June 8, 2012 to March 9, 2012, which meant that it would be going up against Prometheus. Then the next week there were three articles monitored, showing that Fox had decided to move Prometheus to June 8. Anyway — I’m going to the trouble to show this so the methodology of what follows will be clear.
So — what did I find when I put $250m Disney Tentpole “John Carter” side by side with $250m Disney Tentpole “The Avengers” and compared the article placements monitored by IMDB over the final 50 weeks leading up to their release? (And please take note — these are articles, not paid advertisements, that are being tracked.)
Here is the raw data for the final 50 weeks prior to release for each film. To be clear, this covers the final 50 weeks ending on March 9, 2012, for John Carter (its release date), and the final 50 weeks ending May 6, 2012, for The Avengers (its release date).
Here is a graphical representation of the week by week totals for the two films over the final 50 weeks prior to release.
So, that’s the data.
Some caveats and words of caution:
1. The IMDB mechanism does not capture every article that appears anywhere. It does catch a pretty representative wide sampling — and of course, in this comparison, it was the IMDB monitoring of John Carter vs the IMDB monitoring of The Avengers — so theoretically while the absolute numbers might be off, the ratio between the two films should be reasonably valid.
2. The chart does not distinguish between “placements” by the publicity department supporting a film (in which the publicity department releases photos, interviews, etc) and organic articles that appear spontaneously. For example, the articles about the John Carter Fan Trailer are included in the John Carter count, and these were not generated by Disney publicity. There are other articles about both films that are spontaneously or organically generated, without any direct stimulus provided by the publicity department. But a very high percentage of the articles are generated through publicity efforts in which the publicists for the movies release a steady stream of interviews, still photos, posters, trailers, cast news, etc.
3. Another point of differentiation is that the The Avengers also had Marvel as a stakeholder who may be presumed to have pitched in, although the official publicity which accounts for the vast majority of placements came from Disney.
All right — I’ll stop there. I’m interested in comments as to how this data should be interpreted — what story does it tell?
16 comments
Andrew Stanton’s quote in the New Yorker article about JOHN CARTER needing to make $700M to get a sequel could easily have been an indication that Stanton was aware of then current Disney leadership’s resistance to doing the movie in the first place.
$150M movie that earns $300M at the box office does well enough to get a sequel if the people in charge are a willing.
A $150M movie that does $700M at the box office has undeniably earned a sequel even if the people in charge would rather have not made the movie to begin with (much less sequels).
I’m still convinced that the mass movie going public did not know who John Carter was/is and it flew completely under most people’s radar before it came out. The sad marketing was mainly to blame. It’s interesting that you see more Tharks and learn more about the movie in the featurette that ran for kids on the Disney Channel than anything else. It looks like a fun, interesting movie from that little production – whoever put that together should’ve worked on the trailers.
I also know more people who know about the write down than knew the movie was coming out – I’m always hearing that from friends, co-workers and people on Facebook who haven’t seen the movie. That and the fact that it’s science fiction make some say they won’t bother to see it. That write down story did more harm to the movie than anything before it. I bet it helped kill the Japan box office.
I stopped by some of the cheap shows around here and business was good last week, so those folks apparently didn’t care what the negative critics thought and probably missed the write down story.
Jeff: Man, I would have loved to have seen those shots back then. I may not have been reading the right websites or using the right search phrasing in looking for things like that, I guess.
Could it be that fanboy buzz is now important (I truly resist using the word “critical”) to the marketing of genre films? I’m sure a lot of us are old enough to remember when SF and genre movies were not as “respectable” as they are now. Sure, back in the day everyone went to go see “Star Wars” and loved it, but not everyone became die-hard Star Wars fans (just like not everyone seeing “The Avengers” are going to be comic book fans). Back then being a SF nerd didn’t exactly place you on the top rungs of the social ladder. “Star Wars” was THE movie to see – and it was so different and fun it drew in the large crowds.
For sure I can’t remark on Stanton’s intentions because I don’t know the man. What I can infer is that he might have been trying to recapture that sort of natural word of mouth, that early buzz and that his movie would be a success because it was a fun and well-made film (which I found it to be – it made me feel like when “Star Wars” came out). But in this day and age I don’t think that works anymore. Audiences are more jaded, I think, and they need to see a lot more of something before they will commit. Which brings me back to my point about fanboy buzz. I would guess most viewers that flocked to “The Avengers” do not read all the genre sites that worked up the fans into a lather over the movie. True, we had a 5 or so movies that led into it, but it could easily have been a mess of a movie. But you had a giant squee of delight when it was announced that Joss Whedon was writing and directing the movie, and positive buzz started right then. I know I was happy when it was announced that a Pixar director would helm our Barsoom movie (and I was actually hoping for a new kind of Pixar film: all CG, but more adult). But then…I heard nothing else about it for a long time. I understand your comment, Dotar, that it took longer to make than “The Avengers” and would there be a point to leaking anything so early, but I think you kind of have to these days.
I know on a lot of fanboy sites, no trailer for “John Carter” (except Dotar’s fan-made one) generated any curiosity or positive comments. The most widely repeated remark I can recall is, “It looks like “Prince of Persia,” and that sucked!” It’s astonishing to me how quickly minds are made up about something these days.
I just feel that positive buzz on fanboy sites (and I’ll apologize that I use that term so loosely – I know it is often a derogative term for fans and I don’t mean it to be) spills out past its audience and gets absorbed into the mainstream now. That’s not to say that was all the problem the movie had reaching an audience, of course. I think this article is pretty damning about the woeful marketing. I do hope you get to interview Stanton for your book, Dotar. I would love to hear his side of things.
I ( and Mike with John Carter movie.com ) had spy shots from the sets and even some stuff we weren’t showing because we had an invite to go to the Utah set that never happened and we didn’t want to screw it up. But we did show sneak stuff. The biggest one was photos of the 9′ thark models on the Utah set.
Pascalahad wrote:
A couple of thoughts:
1) This particular comparison tried to be “apples to apples” by confining itself to two Disney tentpoles, each with $250m invested, coming out within 8 weeks of each other, and only looking at the final 50 weeks. The final 50 weeks were managed by the same leadership; dealt with the same MT Carney transition; and covers really the most relevant period — particularly the second half of the 50 week window (i.e. the final six months). So I think it is “a” valid comparison, but I think the others you mention are ones to look at as well. JC vs the Hunger Games (it’s main competition over those last 12 months) would be interesting but would tell us something else — not how the same Disney team treated one film differently from another, but how Lions Gate did it vs Disney. Same for Battleship, etc.
2) The other thing is that you seem to imply, or perceive, that much of the publicity “just happens” and this could account for such a huge 4 to 1 disparity. When you break it down further than I have in this comparison, and look not just at the number of placements, but the the number and variety of things released to the media by the publicity department, that perception would start to break up. In other words, it’s not like there was just this natural feeding frenzy for Avengers that was four times more than John Carter. It is absolutely clear when you look at the actual articles that came out, that it’s a managed process and the team managing Avengers was going about it with an altogether greater level of zeal, imagination, and intensity. UPDATE: I did a quick run-through of Battleship, Hunger Games, and Prometheus. HG is pretty much the same as Avengers — never has less than 25 or 30 per week. Battleship has some weaker weeks — a few “1’s” although my impression is that it’s still at least 20% stronger than John Carter. Prometheus is way stronger than John Carter.
3) As for the negative coverage — that’s something else I’ve been looking at and I found it VERY interesting to track. The short version is that there was NO negative anything about John Carter until January 20, 2011, when Disney announced it was moving John Carter up three months from June 8 to March 9. The press didn’t go negative on this; some commenters did, though, questioning whether this was a sign of weakness. The press went with Disney’s line that it was a bold move because March 9, 2012, was the same play date as Prometheus. (A week later Prometheus moved to June 8.) Then the first real negativity by journalists came in May 2011 when Disney announced it had changed the name to John Carter. This was roundly criticized by almost half the outlets covering the story and the comment streams were very negative. Everyone seemed to agree it was a weak move. The chatter went from 90/10 positive to something much closer to 70/30 positive. Then in June 2011 came the Teaser poster and more people jumped on the negativity bandwagon. There were comparisons to a cologne commercial; many found it just too vague. A few liked it — there definitely were some adherents. But the positive/negative went to about 50/50. It was also in June that Stanton, in his interview with Boucher, made casual reference to having done a month of reshoots. This was blood in the water and in subsequent interviews he got asked again and again about the reshoots — and of course he went on the offensive with his whole Pixar Process. But up until this point there was nothing saying the film cost 250m. It had been announced as 150m when Taylor Kitsch was signed and that was the only reference. But after the reshoot talk came out, and then that comment from Stanton in October in the New Yorker piece where he was quoted as saying it would take $700m to get a sequel — journalists extrapolated at $250m budget and the feeding frenzy was really on. Disney never did much to counter the negativity but it seems pretty much like it was Stanton who let the cat out of the bag about the amount of reshoots (which he justified but it was too late) and, indirectly, the budget. It’s all a pretty sad and strange tale when you break it down.
This info is very telling. Sure, Avengers was always going to get higher coverage than John Carter, but it’s those weeks where JC got nothing that send up red flags for me. And seeing this laid out while considering all of the other factors, which will be covered in your book, Michael, really does further support the whole reason for you writing it in the first place.
Dotar Sojat wrote:
” But are you blaming the lack of mag covers on Stanton? I don’t think you are — but I’m not sure. ”
No I’m not blaming Stanton for this. It was just curious that for a major film there was no major coverage in more mainstream magazines prior to its release.
Bringing up the whole secrecy thing around this movie I do remember this-back in 2009 at their Expo Disney did show concept artwork from the movie-there was descriptions of it and I’m sure you can Google it and find articles describing it. But pictures or images of it never showed up, yet pictures of posters, logos and even footage of Johnny Depp announcing the fourth POTC film did. Why was Disney so secretive about this project, especially at that time since it was before MT Carney was hired? I do think Stanton’s idea to keep things under wraps is to blame a lot for this. Now Bob is right and I agree with him on the point that prior to the Internet there was an aura of mystery. It was also prior to DVDs revealing all of the secrets of the trade. Now people are more saavy about that, especially the fanboy crowd. And I do agree-something at Comic Con would have built it up. Stanton’s comments to Boucher about it just sounds like he didn’t want to go. I almost bet he wouldn’t have gone to Disney’s Expo except that the rest of the Pixar team was going to be there. I recently read an interview with William Stout in FilmFax magazine where he talked about working on the Conran John Carter of Mars and how they had put together a 5-10 minute trailer (I’m guessing it’s the same one we’ve seen) and how he thought it was amazing. And all that had was concept artwork and some test footage. If they had done something like that, along with a picture of Kitsch and Collins in costume that would have been enough to tantalize and get that audience excited.
I also understand Dotar’s statement about not beating the drum too early. But considering there have been trailers for The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit a good year before their release dates, plus the fact that Disney was hyping TRON Legacy for almost 3 years at Comic-Con, someone (marketing, Stanton, etc) dropped the ball.
Also Pascalahad is right-a lot of the articles and press about the film in the two months before release were negative-stories about poor tracking numbers, articles that portrayed Stanton as out of control and spending money without care-and Disney never did anything to fix this. Stanton did-but so much of his statements seemed to come back and haunt him (the “Disney fears me” for example) that the damage was done in some respects.
RE: ComicCon… Andrew Stanton told Geoff Boucher in the LA Times:
“I think what it was is the perception that it’s getting harder and harder to stand out amid the din. We’re going to do our special event to get some focus and separation. I know some people will read that as a sign that we’re unsure of our property. It’s just the opposite. We want to control how and what is being seen and the way it is presented. So much stuff now is just spit out so fast and the churn of it all. You almost gain nothing by talking about things really early in this day and age. I think in the future we might see things arrive the way Prince announces a concert where a few days before the show he announces it and tickets just go up. You might see that with movies and other things. That seems like the only way to get people interested and then capitalize off that interest.”
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/06/16/john-carter-andrew-stanton-on-martian-history-comic-con-and-monty-python/
I’m not sure it’s fair to compare the press coverage of both movies. Avengers is basically advertised since the release of Iron Man in 2008, and the characters had numerous adaptations before the release of the movie. Anticipation is necessarily higher. I think a comparison that would be valid is, for example, the coverages of both Avengers and Prometheus. Prometheus is the return of Ridley Scott to the Alien universe, a very known and loved franchise. Anticipation were higher in both cases. John Carter is almost the first adaptation in any medium since 1912, with the exception of a few comic books and the Asylum trashing.
Perhaps it would be more interesting to compare the coverage of John Carter vs Battleship, or vs The Hunger Games (and even perhaps this one is not that relevant, since it’s based on a recent popular novel), three properties with no track record on screen, and no very well known leads. For John Carter I remember reading reports from Disney presentations of its upcoming movies, there were Utah set reports, so there was press coverage.
The problem is perhaps negative press coverage prior to release, I have seen none for Avengers, Prometheus (this one was a very secretive movie), Battleship and The Hunger Games. The chart shows articles from the press, but without qualifying them. I remember vividly that the AICN website was less than enthusiastic after seeing the first John Carter footage, for example. Avengers, Prometheus and even Battleship were praised for their visuals.
BobJ … I’m not sure and need to investigate it further — but one thing to keep in mind is that JC had a looooooong post production because of the Tharks, basically. Avengers began filming on April 26, 2011 and was released May 4, 2012. John Carter began filming in Jan 2010 and was released March 2012 9and was originally scheduled for June 2012)……There is some logic to not beginning the drumbeat 2.5 years out, and that could be the argument for not releasing a lot from the set of JC while it was filming. But again — this analysis is just the last 50 weeks for each film.
I kind of thought that a lot of what kept the movie a secret was that the general public would think of the character on “E.R” first than our Barsoomian warlord. Were there attempts to get set photos at all? I just remember when hearing about the movie being green-lit and up until the first preview we got last summer I had seen a great big zip on anything pertaining to it – well, there was that logo, I think. I was still thinking it was a Pixar movie, so I assumed it had the Pixar secrecy about it but I was getting antsy to see SOMETHING about it.
MCR, I think I can agree with you that the whole secrecy thing might have had at least something to do with it. And maybe part of the blame can be landed at Stanton’s feet for that. I can remember back before the internet, a lot of a movie was not revealed until we actually saw the it in the theaters. Don’t believe we saw the t-rex in “Jurassic Park” until we had out butts in the seat. Personally, I liked it that way. But in this day in age I’m told we want to know about the movie way in advance, have our trailers spell it all out for us so we won’t be surprised in the theater (I’m not sure I buy that notion just yet).
There was just no buzz about the movie, and I think it not being previewed at the San Diego Comic Con had a lot to do with it. I am confident that a lot of fans there would have been eager to see a preview of it – you can really whip up a lot of anticipation for a movie by having the stars and director show up. Heck, just show some some test shots of Tharks and Woola or whatever. The fliers. They could have had something badass to show – just Carter trying to learn to walk – that’s a memorable scene in the book and fans would have loved to see it. You would have had fanboy sites excitedly reporting on it and informing the young ‘uns out there all about Barsoom.
I never expected the movie to make as much money as “Avengers” or “Dark Knight” – but I think it had the potential to do much, much better.
So – stupid question time – would it benefit Disney in anyway to have a giant flop of a movie the year they had a mega-success with “The Avengers”? Tax reasons? Creative accounting? “Yes, yes, we made a ton of money on “Avengers” but “JC” really hurt us, blah, blah, blah….” I am woefully ignorant in Hollywood financial matters, but I’ve thought for a long time the handling of the movie has been fishy. Mistakes were made all around, and I have never said Stanton is totally blameless. But I can’t believe the marketing juggernaut that is Disney could drop the ball so badly on this through incompetence. They should have been able to autopilot the marketing on this one and done it better than they did.
I’m confused, a little:
Yeah, all of that. But are you blaming the lack of mag covers on Stanton? I don’t think you are — but I’m not sure. For me, the lack of magazine covers and all that are consistent with the overall chart. An all-out effort would have landed those mag covers, no doubt about it. Doncha think?
OK so I was wrong with some of those ideas. But let me clarify a few.
“Second, the “new photos, videos, and the like” that you’re talking about are all generated by the publicists for the films. They feed them to the websites and journalists who put them out. They don’t just happen.”
That wasn’t what I meant. Those photos and videos were basically unofficial-the type people snap on their cell phones behind barracades while filming is going on. It seemed-at least with The Avengers-there was tons of that while with John Carter zip. It seemed every time I went on Aint It Cool News or ComingSoon.net or some site like that they were filled with that for Avengers. Now maybe that was Marvel deciding to use that to help promote it, lax security or Joss Whedon not being as paranoid as Stanton was but that does generate news.
“Also, your continued ability to “blame it all on Stanton” is pretty, um, impressive, to say the least. I think that is an angle that bears more investigation but again — we are talking about the final 50 weeks and your’e talking about a period before that.”
Yes I know. Consistency is a part of life 🙂 I also misread the thing about the final 50 weeks. True there did seem to be more releasing of material-but not that much until almost the last month. There was no making of videos or real photos (most of the images on sites were just screen grabs from the trailer) released. I guess compare that to say The Hobbit which has had extensive videos and pictures, plus Twitter updates and the like all the way through. Again it generates news, something John Carter didn’t do. As for actual Stanton statements, just compare his actions to Peter Jackson-that speaks for itself in that department.
“But the movie has a nut publicist on set ”
Well I would say there was a lot of nuts on this movie. Or is that a typo?
Two more theories and I’ll shut up. First how much TV exposure did the film have? I’m not talking about TV spots but real exposure? Late night appearances, morning news shows, Entertaiment Tonight and the like? This was discussed back on the iMDB board before it became flop troll central (and for those who think I’m a troll, you haven’t seen real trolls until you go on there) how it seems only Taylor Kitsch was sent out and it was like two weeks before the movie came out, not the week it did. That could play a factor in publicity. Also how many magazine covers did John Carter get? I’ve found only four-and two of them (Famous Monsters of Filmland and Filmfax) didn’t even cover the movie but ERB, while of the other two one was a British Scifi magazine and the other was HD Camera Pro (or something like that). I also heard there was a cover story for Cinefex but even then those magazines are speciality magazines with limited audiences. They don’t reach the same audience like Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly or even Empire magazine. Was this more of MT Carney’s failure to promote the film or something else?
A couple of notes:
Thanks for the thoughts, MCR.
Here are my comments:
First, this survey only covers the final 50 weeks prior to release. In the case of John Carter, principal photography was completed in July 2010, about 85 weeks prior to the release date. The Avengers completed principal photography about 38 weeks ahead of the release date. So, basically, for the majority of the surveyed period, neither film was in production — both were in post production and pre-release.
Second, the “new photos, videos, and the like” that you’re talking about are all generated by the publicists for the films. They feed them to the websites and journalists who put them out. They don’t just happen.
Also, your continued ability to “blame it all on Stanton” is pretty, um, impressive, to say the least. I think that is an angle that bears more investigation but again — we are talking about the final 50 weeks and your’e talking about a period before that. Look at the graph and just take the second half — the last 25 weeks. For John Carter that would be from October through the release date. Now … .surely there was nothing secretive at that point. The publicity push began on June 15 with the first poster, and July 11 with the first trailer. After that the promotion was “on” and Stanton wasn’t being anything but cooperative with the idea of promoting the film. He may have had some “no spoilers” issues, but no issues about simply not releasing information. If you honestly think that’s not the case at that point in time — please try and find some evidence and share it.
Finally — I can tell you from looking at the data that if anything, John Carter got more of a boost from its stars promoting other movies than the one in question. There was quite a bit of Mark Strong promoting Green Lantern and another movie — Purefoy had a movie he was promoting, and so on. This was particularly noticable in all those weeks when John Carter had 5 or less placements. Those weeks were almost always weeks where Disney put out nothing, and the 2 or 3 placements were one or another star promoting another movie and mentioning John Carter. By contrast, Avengers had so many placements each month, that the percentage of those placements that were random mentions during promotions of other movies was very small. So I don’t think that theory will bear up under scrutiny, although to really test it we would need to really just crunch the numbers — see how many of the placements were of that type. But with Avengers leading JC 4 to 1 in overall number of placements, it’s really unlikely that this would be “the explanation” or even a major part of it.
I do think the issue of Stanton’s position on publicity is something I will need to investigate further. Can you send me some links to stories that support your position on this. I haven’t seen anything that says they had a closed set in Utah because Stanton wanted it that way. I know that no one could randomly walk onto the set but I guarantee you that’s the case for Avengers or any other big movie. But remote locations are more difficult for arranging set visits. But the movie has a nut publicist on set so the mechanism is there. But send me some evidence — I’d like to look into it and make sure I give full consideration to it.
I’ll give it a shot and probably still get yelled at for something.
What the data seems to imply to me is you had “public” film vs. a “secretive” film, going by the amount of publicity stories. With The Avengers because of them shooting the film in New York, Cleveland and other outdoor locations-major metropolitan areas-and with what I guess you can describe as lax security there was constant news about the shoot. It seemed new photos, video and the like was showing up every day. Contrast that with John Carter which was shot in soundstages in England and in the middle of nowhere, Utah. Zero photos or video to report, no sightings, nothing. What was there to report about John Carter for a long time? Also (and this will be the yelling part) there was Andrew Stanton’s belief that he didn’t want anyone to know anything about this film. It seems to have extended to the closed down shooting. Even in Utah the only pictures that surfaced was the empty Martian set they built. Because of that there was nothing to get the news media interested or to build up publicity. Personally I felt that Stanton’s paranoia about not letting anyone know about this film-sorry his belief that audiences shouldn’t have it spoiled for them-probably didn’t help in the end. Contrary to his opinion people do like to know what the film they’re about to pay for is about ahead of time and the lackluster posters and trailers (and I know it’s been debated about his involvement and how much he was but he still approved them and it does seem to fit his MO in this regard) didn’t help.
The other theory is this-most of the cast of The Avengers had movies coming out while the film was in production or prior to its release so interviewers were asking them about it and that produces news items. With John Carter the only two actors I can think of who had films out during production or prior to it were Willem Dafoe and Mark Strong, and in the case of Dafoe he was pretty tight lipped about it while Strong…well his blabbing pretty much should have been the warning sign that the film had zero resemblance to the book.
I’m sure this is just wrong but that’s my best shot.